poets lie, she said

it's what they do, like dogs
bark or run around, or tvs
make that little noise, not quite
like a mosquito's whine, and
not quite unlike it either

in some small fly-sized way, poets
are like mosquitoes too, how beans
resemble kidneys, kidneys nostrils,
nostrils, sometimes, a socket, where
the longest-burning bulb
in the world was unscrewed, after
it burned out, after two hundred years